Tea Party and Climate Change

The New York Times publishes an article marveling at the notion that the Tea Party is skeptical of climate change and of the cap and tax legislation supposed to be a solution for it. Never mind that a Democratic Congress and president elected before the Tea Party started have not managed to enact cap and tax. The Times adopts a conspiratorial view that this is all the result of "the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it."

The Times goes on:

They have created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.

Their views are spread by a number of widely followed conservative opinion leaders, including Mr. Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, George Will and Sarah Palin, who oppose government programs to address climate change and who question the credibility and motives of the scientists who have raised alarms about it.

The idea that George Will or Sarah Palin are somehow puppets of the fossil fuel industry is just strange. Ms. Palin clashed with oil interests when she was governor of Alaska, and Mr. Will is an independent thinker. The Times describes Americans for Prosperity as "a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests," and FreedomWorks as "another group supported by the oil industry." Yet the Center for American Progress Action Fund is described by the Times as "a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington," without any word about where it gets its funding, even though its board, according to its most recently available tax return, includes Hilary Rosen, a paid operative of British Petroleum.

The whole article is a classic example of the Times trying to explain something that only its liberal editors think need an explanation. The paper can't explain or understand why anyone would genuinely doubt the science behind climate change or the need to raise taxes in response to it. So it reaches for the idea that anyone who holds these views must obviously be bought and paid for by Big Oil.